t is becoming more common in the U.S. workforce that persons are maintaining employment longer for both personal and financial reasons. Americans over the age of 55 account for 22% of the nation's job growth and represent 18 million persons in the workforce. (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2000). As the baby-boom generation moves toward retirement age and as health care advances continue, more individuals are choosing to continue to engage in full and part time work activities. The value of work as a source of personal identity and reward, remains a strong component of many aging person's lives. (Szymanski, Ryan, Merz, Trevino & Johnston-Rodriguez, 1996).

As a result of persons remaining in the workforce, the opportunity for greater occurrences of traumatic and disease related disabilities exist. Fortunately, advances in medicine and rehabilitation, have made living and working with a disability a greater possibility. Aging with a disability has been described as one of the most important new developments in rehabilitation. (Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, 2001). The purpose of this article is to identify some of the key issues affecting older persons with late-onset disabilities (post age 55) and to offer some recommendations for rehabilitation professionals to facilitate maximum adjustment to employment and other important life areas.

Psychosocial Adjustment

Adult smoking prevalence has been falling in the United States, down from 42.4 percent in 1965 to 24.1 percent in 1998, a 43 percent reduction. The percentage of adults who never smoked increased from 44 percent in the mid-1960s to 55 percent in 1997.1 It is not surprising then that owners of restaurants have responded to changing customer preferences by changing how they allocate their air space between smoking and non-smoking use. Restaurants without non-smoking seating sections have become exceptions. These provisions are not isolated to locations where state or local laws restrict or ban smoking and indicate an active private market in accommodation.

It has been shown that areas with lower adult smoking rates have more smoking laws and bans. It is important to note, however, that such laws have been introduced without much benefit of research on how the private market has dealt with the issue of accommodation of both smokers and non-smokers. Proponents of smoking restrictions often argue that smoking exerts a negative externality on non-smokers and that governments should control smoking through laws and bans. [Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, 2002] Even if such externalities exist, it would appear to be useful first to ask whether, in the absence of laws, private markets work toward internalizing the externalities. An active market in accommodation might indicate that laws and bans are simply overturning, partially or totally, actions of owners that had successfully dealt with smoking-related externalities.

On Jacobsen's ideal platform, an absolute architectural morality prevails--there can be no mistakes and no excuses, no afterthoughts and no escape clauses, about the siting of the individual components of the scheme. No room for improvization, no exploiting the happy accident--and no room for growth.' Reyner Banham

In his 1964 review, Reyner Banham may well be forgiven for arguing so forcibly that Arne Jacobsen's St Catherine's College in Oxford was complete. In his critical account for The Architectural Review--in which he somewhat provocatively described St Cat's as 'the best motel in Oxford'--Banham was as clear in his criticism as Jacobsen was in his vision. St Cat's could, he stated, be understood in a single sweep of the eye. It was, he observed, an exercise in elementary composition, the footprint of which was more a logical outworking of architectural proportion than a constraint of the site, which, as a reinterpretation of the closed courtyard, had made a valuable contribution to British collegiate architecture.

The Fair Housing Amendments Act (FHAA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 3601 et seq., prevents a landlord from inflexibly applying a no-cosigners policy to disabled tenants, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held. The FHAA requires a landlord to reasonably accommodate disabled tenants who cannot meet the income requirements for a lease because of their disabilities by assessing, on an individual basis, the risk of nonpayment created by a cosigner arrangement.

Here, Giebeler, who has AIDS, was unable to work due to his illness. His mother agreed to pay the rent for him. The apartment complex, which had minimum financial requirements for lessees and did not allow cosigners, refused to rent to Giebeler or his mother.

Giebeler filed suit against the apartment complex and several of its employees individually, alleging violations of the FHAA in that defendants failed to reasonably accommodate his disability. The trial court granted defendants summary judgment.

Reversing, the Ninth Circuit noted that plaintiff's disability is directly related to his inability to obtain a lease in his own name. His lack of income is due to his illness, the court noted, and therefore he is disabled for the purposes of the FHAA, and the apartment complex is required to reasonably accommodate him. Citing U.S. Supreme Court case law, the court said that it is permissible for an accommodation to favor disabled persons over others, and accommodations may compensate for the practical impact of a disability, not merely for its immediate manifestations. Plaintiff's inability to work is such a practical impact, the court said.

DESPITE the rising costs of settlement agreements, taking a case to trial still exceeds the price of cutting a check.

Although every case differs, attorneys say that opting to settle will shave al least one-third, and frequently more, off the expense of a lawsuit. Attorneys" fees, insurance coverage and the risks of a jury' verdict often supersede the desire to prove who's right.

"If the difference is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, almost any sophisticated business litigator will say, "If the parties work hard, we should be able to settle this case,'" said Jeffrey Riffer, a partner of Jeffer Mangels Butler & Marmaro LLP. "In the long run, it's economics."

The highest cost in trying a case is attorneys' tees. At $300 to $400 per hour, paying a lawyer can account for hundreds of thousands of dollars of an overall trial cost.

"The attorneys' costs are so huge today it's almost insane," said Joel Grossman, former deputy general counsel of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and now at ADR Services Inc., a private arbitration and mediation firm. "There's no way to intelligently litigate a case where there's less than a couple of hundred thousand dollars involved. It doesn't make any sense."

In divorce cases, emotional issues often cloud decisions about settling. But once the dust has settled, taking the case to trial often proves too costly even for the wealthiest of clients.

UK-based student accommodation web site Accommodation for Students has conducted research on the best places to be a student in the UK.

The survey of 1,720 students revealed that Cardiff was deemed the best place to study, followed by Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Cambridge and Newcastle upon Tyne.

An Infinity of Little Hours: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order.

By Nancy Klein Maguire. Public Affairs, 272 pp., $13.95 paperback.

IN OUR NOISY and technologically correct secular society, mystery and silence are as absent as they are secretly craved. Two of the most austere Western monastic orders to distill this countercultural craving are the Carthusians and Trappists. They share the three vows of obedience, stability of place and conversion of life. The Carthusians are the focus of Nancy Maguire's book. I myself belong to the Trappist tradition.
Maguire's accomplishment in description is all the more impressive because she is a woman plumbing a severely masculine domain. She brings to this work not theological training but scholarly expertise in theater (she has been a scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library since 1983). Through her marriage to an ex-Carthusian, she was able to locate five men who from 1960 to 1965 experienced the rigorous formation in the virtually closed Carthusian world of the Parkminster Charterhouse in West Sussex, England. Maguire teases us throughout to guess which of the five men is the one who takes the lifelong vows of solemn profession. I guessed wrong.

Her research included 6,000 pages of e-mail communication, a considerable number of faxes, and extensive use of letters, pictures, books, journals and telephone conversations, culminating in a face-to-face reunion of the five, who had retired and were in their 70s.

Q. Does the ADA require employers to have telework programs?

A. No. The ADA does not require an employer to offer a telework program to all employees. However, if an employer does offer telework, it must allow employees with disabilities and equal opportunity to participate in such a program.

Q. May permitting an employee to work at home be a reasonable accommodation, even if the employer has no telework program?

A. Yes. Changing the location where work is performed may fall under the ADA's reasonable accommodation requirement of modifying workplace policies, even if the employer does not allow other employees to telework. However, an employer is not obligated to adopt an employee's preferred or requested accommodation and may instead offer alternate accommodations as long as they would be effective.

Q. How should an employer determine whether someone may need to work at home as a reasonable accommodation?

A. This determination should be made through a flexible "interactive process" between the employer and the individual. The process begins with a request. An individual must first inform the employer that s/he has a medical condition that requires some change in the way a job is performed. The individual does not need to use special words, such as "ADA" or "reasonable accommodation" to make this request, but must let the employer know that a medical condition interferes with his/her ability to do the job.

An HR professional once re marked that engaging in the interactive process required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) feels like Rollerblading in a minefield--while blindfolded. That's an understandable sentiment, especially when the situation at hand involves an employee whose performance has dropped in ways that are difficult to measure.

This article presents an example of the difficult lines employers must sometimes draw when an employee's medical condition causes a drop-off in performance. This example is a composite of several real-life situations, some of which ended up in court and some of which were successfully resolved without litigation.
Analyzing this example in light of the ADA'S framework hopefully will assist HR professionals in navigating the interactive process while steering clear of the land mines.

Sam, the manager of the accounting department a mid- sized manufacturing company, has had a good career, receiving promotions and assuming greater responsibilities over time. However, things change dramatically following a diagnosis of diabetes. He begins to experience fatigue and other symptoms.

People with disabilities are just one of the groups designated for special attention in relation to equity in postsecondary education. This paper explores the way in which policies that provide academic accommodation for students disabled by chronic illness unfold in practice. As part of the administrative regime of the university, these policies are typically designed to reconcile the interests and relevances of the law with the interests and relevances of the academy. When a disabled student "activates" the policy, regardless of whether or not services and assistance are provided or are useful, the student becomes situated within social relations that make disabled students' "needs" manageable in the organizational context. As applicants for the institution's privileges and services, students actively participate in the accomplishment of the institutional order of the university, i.e., they fulfil the university's legal obligation not to discriminate against students with disabilities. This, I will argue, constitutes an exercise of power and preserves the existing social organization of the university, although it is normally understood as the university acting "in the interests of students with disabilities." Specifically, I show how the individualization of accommodation--ostensibly to meet each student's unique needs--shifts the obligation for change to individual students and instructors and forecloses opportunities for the university to become more genuinely accessible and inclusive.